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The Real “War on Women”

Mar 16, 2012

By Dave Andrusko

Mara Hvistendahl

By now, all but those who make a living shouting about the “war on women” must be tired of this cant. We’ve written about this all speed and no altitude nonsense for weeks. And we’re going to conclude another week’s editions of National Right to Life News Today by turning to a column on that very topic written by the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman.

He makes a very important point right from the get-go, one we’ve written about. Chapman looks at a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that asks whether employers ought to be able to “opt-out” of the Obama mandate that requires virtually all employers to pay for services whether or not they regard them as wrong on moral or religious grounds.

If part of the “war on women” is balking at this mandate, then the poll should show that women support the mandate. In fact more women favored allowing any employer to opt out than said it should be mandatory. And when asked specifically about “religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university,” women said they should be allowed to opt out by a decisive 53% to 38% majority!

This hasn’t stopped the Planned Parenthoods and NOWs from shouting from the hilltops, of course. But then there is this from Chapman:

“Those advocates have been distracted from a different and far less figurative war on women—which, as it happens, is helped rather than hindered by one of the ‘reproductive rights’ they champion.”

Sex-selective abortions have become “a powerful method for the mass elimination of females.” Hundreds of millions of women are “missing” because of gendercide, according to the book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” by Mara Hvistendahl.

But the ethos of “abortion rights” has long since moved on to targeting not only babies of the “wrong” sex, but babies who are “imperfect.”

The same technology that can determine an unborn baby’s gender can also be employed to seek-and-destroy babies with various anomalies, most commonly, but by no means only, babies with Down syndrome.

In some sense, Chapman writes, this “was probably an inevitable result of the proliferation of abortion.”

But, again, the train only briefly stopped at the station; it is moving on to “after-birth abortion” [infanticide] which is “ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be,” according to the two bioethicists who wrote the article.  This means, Chapman argues, “really, for any reason at all.”

Is making the case for infanticide really just an academic exercise to kick around in journals? Well, in a debate last fall, Ann Furedi, head of the pro-abortion British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said, “There is nothing magical about passing through the birth canal that transforms it from a fetus into a person.” And, as Chapman observes, “The Netherlands now allows physicians to euthanize newborns with a ‘hopeless prognosis’ and ‘unbearable suffering’ if the parents authorize it.”

To come full circle, there is a REAL war on women—it takes the form of sex-selective abortion—which is part of a wider war—a war on the imperfect and the unwanted.

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